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The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf QUOTES

The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf QUOTES

1 " Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this. "

― Vita Sackville-West , The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf

2 " I believe that the main thing in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can't cross; that its to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish. [VW] "

― Vita Sackville-West , The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf

3 " And still the strange meaningless conversations continue, and I wonder more and more at the fabric which nets the world together, so that anything which I do finally incubate out of my system into words will quite certainly be about solitude. Solitude and the desirability of it, if one is to achieve anything like continuity in life, is the one idea I find in the resounding vacancy which is my head. "

― Vita Sackville-West , The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf

4 " I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your un-dumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is just really a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this —But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it. "

― Vita Sackville-West , The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf

5 " Like a little warm coal in my heart burns your saying that you miss me. I miss you oh so much. How much, you’ll never believe or know. At every moment of the day. It is painful but also rather pleasant, if you know what I mean. I mean, that it is good to have so keen and persistent a feeling about somebody. It is a sign of vitality. "

― Vita Sackville-West , The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf

6 " Is it better to be extremely ambitious, or rather modest? Probably the latter is safer; but I hate safety, and would rather fail gloriously than dingily succeed. "

― Vita Sackville-West , The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf

7 " You will get letters, very reasoned and illuminating, from many people; I cannot write you that sort of letter now, I can only tell you that I am shaken, which may seem to you useless and silly, but which is really a greater tribute than pages of calm appreciation... "

― Vita Sackville-West , The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf

8 " Don't mind being as miserable as you like with me - I have a great turn that way myself - [VW] "

― Vita Sackville-West , The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf

9 " It is only that I want to be with you and not with anybody else - but you would get bored if I go on saying this, only it comes back and back till it drips of my pen. "

― Vita Sackville-West , The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf

10 " My bed's at least nine foot wide, and I feel like the Princes and the Pea, - only there is no Pea. It is a four-poster, all of which I like. Come and see for yourself. "

― Vita Sackville-West , The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf